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However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing position for the duration of the story.

Jonathan Lethem

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Jonathan Lethem
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: February 19
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Jonathan Allen Lethem
Harry Conklin
Whether
Remain
Enact
Stories
Consider
Appalling
Character
Characters
Duration
Every
However
Tedious
Standing
Furniture
Novel
Named
Position
Unable
Story
Requires
Unnamed

More quotes by Jonathan Lethem

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I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. God, forget scissors - that's beyond the pale.
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I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.
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I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.
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Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can’t have. And then about what you receive and misuse.
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It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.
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By removing the stories from the morass of things that surround us, I'm hoping to achieve some kind of purer approach to emotional life.
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I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it-astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. . . . It really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume.
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Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
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Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.
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Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle.
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You can't be deep without a surface
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I definitely care about how the concept of New York punk was constructed, and why it mattered. But I wasn't gonna do that. Partly because I'm not a great journalist...
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I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
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I want what we all want, said Carl. To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.
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My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.
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Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.
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One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.
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...Don't rupture another's illusion unless you're positive the alternative you offer is more worthwhile than that from which you're wrenching them. Interrogate your solipsism: Does it offer any better a home than the delusions you're reaching to shatter?
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How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end. As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all?
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I'm gregarious with writers and never with manuscripts . . . I [like to] create the illusion of seamless perfection, so I alone know the flawed homely process along the way.
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